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What are the best brands doing to stay relevant, build trust, and create content smarter?
At Share Your Genius, we have the same questions, so we're tapping the best in the space for their answers—one voicemail at a time.
Join us each week for quick hits of insights from b2b marketers and leaders.
[00:00:00]
[00:00:10] Hey, hey. So, if you've been listening to this show for a minute, you'll probably sense a theme in the questions that I'm asking.
[00:00:16] A really common one that I am uncovering is, “How has content helped brands achieve business outcomes?” The person that I tapped to answer this question has a really long career in marketing across multiple different industries. She spent over a decade crafting content strategies for LED Lights, fire trucks, glamping, you name it.
[00:00:39] And she's really proven that no matter the industry, content can be a powerful tool to build relationships, grow audiences, and ultimately achieve business outcomes. Who is this? Chelsea Lassen, Director of Content Comms and Storytelling at Cority. She really has emphasized that in order to build a brand, you have to go beyond creating compelling content, because if you're not leveraging that content to really fuel your business growth, what's the point? So, of course, I asked her, “How has content truly helped you drive business success?”
[00:01:14] Here is what she had to say.
[00:01:25] Chelsea Lassen: Hey, Amanda. Thanks for calling, sorry I missed you.
[00:01:28] So, I've got some good thoughts to share on this. I'm gonna focus maybe specifically on one role where I had lots of creative freedom to do whatever I want and had great outcomes.
[00:01:37] So, let me know what you think about this.
[00:01:39] In one of my roles, I was leading marketing for a company that did LED lighting tech for fire trucks and ambulances,
[00:01:47] and we turned that into a social-first, social-led demand engine by putting all of our focus on social media.
[00:01:56] Largely content-wise, it was social media. We grew our following by over 340% across all platforms, and that ultimately resulted in 43% of our inbound leads coming from organic social.
[00:02:09] There were also a lot of really good qualitative examples that came from that, too.
[00:02:13] And I'll circle back on the data in a second,
[00:02:15] but we had, for example, like my CEO was at an industry lobbying event at Capitol Hill one time,
[00:02:23] and he was in the room, the same room as a presidential candidate at the time,
[00:02:28] and then people ran into the room wanting to take selfies with my CEO, not a presidential candidate
[00:02:34] because they have been following our content on TikTok and seen everything that he did.
[00:02:39] Or people would rush to our booths at trade shows because they wanted to meet our salespeople, who they saw on social media all the time.
[00:02:45] Or when our sales guys would go and visit accounts, when they would get there,
[00:02:49] The people there would say, "Oh, we were just like scrolling through, you know, your Facebook last night."
[00:02:53] And, they already had so much information from us, and they had built such an important relationship with us through that. Ultimately, like, this kind of changed how the company thought about social media. It wasn't just like fluff or this like one-way distribution channel where you're putting out announcements and links to blogs and this and that.
[00:03:14] Like, we used it as a strategic business lever to build trust and drive, ultimately, a direct pipeline.
[00:03:21] I think one way to think of it is that you're not broadcasting, you're building a relationship. So, think of when you're creating a post for social media, regardless of the platform, it should feel like something, like a two-way conversation with your like smartest, funniest friend, not a brand just shouting into the void. Ultimately, that means being human.
[00:03:42] You can mix product demos with memes or humor with helpfulness. I really like it when brands take the approach of building war and inside jokes with their audience.
[00:03:50] And that's something that you can weave into your content over time, and ultimately, that lets your audience see themselves in your content.
[00:03:57] When I was with the company that did the LED lighting tech, like, some of our best posts came from the comments and DMs, and these are like feedback loops that you can really only get from channels like social media.
[00:04:08] It could be a hard thing to get going because everyone in the B2B space is so focused on attribution of every single little action.
[00:04:17] And if you can't prove ROI really quickly, then a lot of marketing leaders wanna quit that and move on to the next thing. But investing in brand and building brand takes time, a lot of time. And the best way to do that is through content, and in my opinion, social-first content for social media.
[00:04:35] And so, rather than trying to correlate every single post to the pipeline, like I recommend looking at more from the lens of correlating, there are impressions from organic social on every platform,
[00:04:48] and how many emails went out that week, and even, like sales calls that were made.
[00:04:53] Count that up and then correlate it over time to revenue, and that'll give you a much better picture of how your investment in brand is actually working, linear, and that you can't say, like, "This one post resulted in X amount of pipeline." That's just not how work works.
[00:05:11] So overall, two things:
[00:05:12] Just keep content as a relationship-building two-way channel. And look at attribution, take a step back, and look at it from the broader picture.
[00:05:21] Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions, and I'll talk to you soon.
[00:05:33] Amanda Smith: Thank you for listening. Want your podcast to do more? Subscribe to Genius Cuts because it's never just a podcast.